Win7 – Day2
by Jesse on Jun.16, 2009, under Win7, Windows
Ok, more like Day-4, but time runs away.
So far, so good. If they manage to not screw the pooch between now and Oct 22nd, Microsoft may have almost come close to trying to redeem themselves.
I’m running Win7 on two computers now. My laptop, which at work I’ve mostly rendered into a terminal server by implementing a very limited VDI infrastructure (different post entirely) but it gives me a chance to play.
It’s fairly quick, suspends/resumes on demand without too much belching.
I’m still annoyed that it doesn’t use all 4G of my laptops memory, but the way I understand it that’s a limitation in the hardware/chipset more than anything. (I’m not too saavy on Intel-based limitations, so this is a guess)
Most importantly, and where Win7 excels opposed to Vista, is even in Beta, all of my usual software runs. Right out of the box, no patches/updates needed. I’m impressed.
Even Roxio Easy Media Creator 10 loads, complete with the ISO mounter that I’ve come to depend on.
On my desktop it screams. My desktop is a Dual-Core 2.8G box with 4G of ram. (Still hit the 3200Meg limit though
It discovered the quad-head setup with only minor tweaking and hasn’t lost the layout once the way Vista usually does. (About once a week I was having to remind Vista where each monitor is in relation to the other one. Graphics are blazingly fast but I’ve yet to test it with Call of Duty 4 or something that really exercizes the Dual 2-port 1GB PCI-e Video cards this thing runs.
The TV tuner works out of the box, and media center has some nice tweaks, including (finally) the ability to record/DVR directly to a share. (Given that my DVR area is a Terabyte of Celerra NAS, that’s a meaningful accomplishment for me) Using Vista I was having to script a copy from the internal drive to the share, and MediaCenter was not able to read the details once they were moved, they just became random videos. (Despite the fact that the .dvr-ms filetype contains the metadata structures to keep the program information handy)
So all in all, not too bad.
And what’s the deal with the black&white icons in the system tray? I would expect these as “place holders” in the early beta versions while the new icons can be developed.. but this:
Simply doesn’t make any sense.
Anyone else playing with Win7? What are your thoughts?
June 17th, 2009 on 10:15 pm
I’m loving Win7 so far, the 64bit version gives me access to the entirety of my 8Gb RAM. Those limits sound like you’re running 32bit. The only problems I’ve had is accessing the box via UltraVNC, so far no luck
COD4 only uses DirectX 9, so I doubt you’ll see much performance increase there. Still a brilliant game though.
June 20th, 2009 on 5:15 pm
It didn’t like mine, but then again, I’ve come to understand that there is a difference between “True” 64-bit architecture, and what Intel calls 64-bit architecture.
I’m running on a Core-2 Duo on my dell notebook, and it did in fact only report 3.2G usable in both the x86 and x64 versions.